Quote from: HappyDaze;1068431I don't like dice to dictate something that itself becomes an ongoing modifier (and a static modifier is really all ability scores are in D&D) for the whole life of the character.

By this reasoning, you should never roll dice for damage against PCs, but always make the result 0. After all, there is no greater ongoing modifier than PC death.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1066672Take a look at the DnD tag on twitter and all you'll see is hipster kids showing off drawings of their totally non-human orange or red or blue or purple thing, which they'll call 'my boi' or 'this cutie' or whatever, to the point where you wonder whether the fuck they've ever had them inside a dungeon or their whole campaign is just about the characters eating cake while complaining about the patriarchy.

So what do you think about modern D&D having all these kids playing tieflings, aasimar, genasi, tabaxi, dragonborn etc.?

Is it 'special snowflakeism'? Does it let them show off their (mostly imagined) non-conformity by all doing the exact same thing?

But is it basically harmless? Does it add to the game? or make it worse?

You spend too much time on twitter.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1068452By this reasoning, you should never roll dice for damage against PCs, but always make the result 0. After all, there is no greater ongoing modifier than PC death.

You've obviously not played D&D. Death in D&D is easier to overcome than bad ability scores.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1068431I don't like dice to dictate something that itself becomes an ongoing modifier (and a static modifier is really all ability scores are in D&D) for the whole life of the character. If those values randomly changed, then fine, but rolling to see how strong you are in the moment before rolling to see how well your melee attack goes is an unnecessary step IMO. For the same reason, I go with static hit points per level as opposed to rolling them anew each day.

For that matter it's not like use of Character Funnels, re-roll 1's, and countless other methods aren't used by those who say "dice rolls only" to ensure you don't end up with a gimped character.

Kyle talks about arrays/point buy producing above average characters... but why would an average person be going into a monster infested death trap in the first place? And again, even if its not as overt as a deliberate character funnel, just the laws of attrition for 1st level characters with poor ability scores in older editions of D&D tended to weed out sub-optimal PCs pretty quickly until the player finally rolled up one where the probabilities were on their side and the XP system of the time let them quickly catch up to their fellow players.

All point buy does is save all that wasted effort and let you build the character you actually want to play from the start.

In my experience Snowflakes mostly show up when random rolls for ability scores are used and the player is the GM's pet so they can get away with fudging their dice rolls and use the cover of "its all random, I just got lucky" to make it not quite so blatant that the GM is playing favorites (or the snowflake is abusing the GM's trust). Point buy (or arrays, which I prefer) instantly reveals if the snowflake is cheating on their character sheet because their numbers won't add up right and snowflakes hate it in my experience when they can't actually be the best at everything... something point-buy and even more particularly arrays ("what do you mean one of my scores has to be below average?") prevents.

The only other type of player I've met who prefers random rolls (versus accepting random rolls because the GM has been taught that they're just how you do things) is the one who wants the random dice rolls to control the type of character they play and their preference is usually more the "roll in order" variety of dice rolling (whereas 4d6, drop lowest, arrange in any order is the kludge 3e came up with to at least skip some of the character funneling... but notably all their organized play groups and 4E made array/point-buy the default) because that cedes control over everything that the PC themselves could not control to the whims of probability and that's what they're looking for; to get into the headspace of this new random person and decide what they'd do with the lot "life" has handed them.

I can appreciate that sentiment, but its not to everyone's taste (including my own). The compromise in my own system for this style of play would be rolling randomly to see which ability array you're going to use (I have three options; focused/excels at one thing, strong/good at a couple things, and balanced/above average in many things) and then roll to see which ability gets your best score, your next best score, etc. You can also roll randomly for your species, background and archetype (i.e. fighting man or magic-user... classes are specific expressions of your archetype and something you'd be able to choose for yourself in character) so your only actual choices left are those your PC would actually be able to make for themselves.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1068487You've obviously not played D&D. Death in D&D is easier to overcome than bad ability scores.

My preference in a D&D or D&D-like game is that the scores be mostly selected, but have a small amount of random variation to account for "playing what life has dealt to the character."  I've accomplished that different ways in past games.  

Lately, however, most of the players I encounter don't care that much about it one way or the other.  So I've defaulted to using "standard array" instead of point buy or other more involved options.  It's even simpler than rolling, doesn't produce anything too extreme, and gets the players to focus on the character that much sooner.

If push came to shove, I'd be fairly happy, for example, with a 5E game where standard array was the start.  Then do something like roll 4 or 6 dice of two different colors, with one color meaning a +1 bump in an ability in the order of the d6 roll, and the other color meaning a -1 in the same way.  (For example, roll Green 1, 1, 2, bump up Strength twice and Con once.  Roll Red 1, 3, 4, bump down Strength, Dex, and Int.)  Out of 20 odd players in my groups, I might have one or two besides me that would find that variation a useful exercise.

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;1068480You spend too much time on twitter.

That's likely true, inasmuch as I spend time on Twitter.

Quote from: Chris24601the laws of attrition for 1st level characters with poor ability scores in older editions of D&D tended to weed out sub-optimal PCs pretty quickly until the player finally rolled up one where the probabilities were on their side and the XP system of the time let them quickly catch up to their fellow players.

On the contrary. I find the characters with the good stats got killed, and those with shitty stats survived. Why? Because if they had good stats the players were careless with them, if they had shitty stats they played smart.

Of course, you may have shitty players, or you as DM may not encourage and reward smart play. But this is a cross-system problem.

Quote from: Chris24601;1068518Kyle talks about arrays/point buy producing above average characters... but why would an average person be going into a monster infested death trap in the first place?

Because they're not going alone, they have the rest of the party with them.

Hector was a mortal man, Achilles was invulnerable, except for his ankles. Both were heroes, but each of a different type. Are your heroes extraordinary people who do extraordinary things, or ordinary people who do extraordinary things? Do you survive because you're a hero, or are you a hero because you survive?

Ancient Greek myth and modern American cinema and computer games are about extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. We'll call these Greek heroes. But many stories - and reality - are about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. We'll call these British heroes.

Old wargames didn't have one Greek hero hewing his way through the enemy ranks. They had infantry, cavalry, artillery and so on - each quite ordinary on their own, but how they co-ordinated with each-other under the player's leadership was what produced victory. Chess is the simplest example of this, even the queen can't move like a knight, nor can she castle like a rook. Individual pieces are more or less valuable, but each has their role to play. I would observe that D&D evolved out of wargames, by the way. The roots of D&D lie in the British hero - vulnerable, specialised, but working with others to make up for what he couldn't do on his own.

Observe the difference between the 1960s Mission Impossible tv series and the Tom Cruise movies. In the TV series, nobody was above average overall - each was just good at 1-2 things. But together as a team they could do extraordinary things. In the movie, though, the whole team except for Tom Cruise is wiped out in the first ten minutes. Cruise's character has to do everything because there's nobody else. Even more Mary Sue was Jack Reacher, of course, but that's another (painful) story.



Now, in movies this makes sense. A TV series has many episodes to give a chance for all the characters to shine, a movie has 110 minutes, that's just enough time for one guy and 1-2 sidekicks. So the guy has to speak 10 languages and be a crack shot and a good climber and a master of hand-to-hand and a great computer hacker and a deductive genius and good-looking and so on and so forth. Likewise in computer games - AI is too retarded still, and other players aren't always around to play, so your character has to be uber-powerful just to cover all the possibilities. Your computer game character has to be way above average to have any chance of survival.

Now consider a roleplaying game. There are typically 3-6 players plus the DM, and it's not a one-off but a campaign of several or even hundreds of sessions. Does this more resemble a wargame or a computer game? A TV series or a movie?

And consider what we want in a game session. We game for the challenge, and why don't we just sit at home playing PS4? Because we want a social experience. We want the players to be challenged, and for them to work together. If we have four uber-capable Rambo Sherlock Jackie Chan Gandalf, are they challenged and do they even need to work together? But what if we had four characters, each of whom was overall pretty ordinary, but really good at just one thing? Well then they'd have to be creative, and they'd have to work together.

As an example, in one adventure my players came across a room with sarcophagi and mummies in them. The party sat on one lid and the MU cast hold portal on another. Then the MU got a rock drill and drilled a hole in the lid the PCs were sitting on, poured in oil and lit it up. They then did the same to the other one.

What were their stats? What level were they? It didn't matter. Because they used their wits as players, their characters' abilities didn't matter - apart from the creative use of one single first level MU spell. Whereas if the MU had had a wand of fireballs or everyone had had 100 hit points and 18/00 Strength, they wouldn't have had to be creative and could just pound away at the mummies. Necessity is the mother of invention, and ordinary characters will, working together, do extraordinary things - because they have to.

Letting every player make a Rambo Sherlock Jackie Chan Gandalf denies them the opportunity to use their wits and work together productively. That is, by making everyone awesome, you make everyone lame and boring. Don't do that to your players. Let them struggle and win against the odds by using their wits and working as a team.

3d6 down the line. Fighter, magic-user, cleric and thief. It's the way it should be.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1069510Ancient Greek myth and modern American cinema and computer games are about extraordinary people doing extraordinary things. We'll call these Greek heroes. But many stories - and reality - are about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. We'll call these British heroes.

And then there is the very British hero, James Bond.  Not a particularly ordinary sort, is he?

That said, I like the idea of D&D as the Mission:Impossible team, or any other team from TV or Movies.  It is very much a cooperative game.

Kyle, you don't seem to understand that the standard array produces people that are exceptional, but not outrageously so. You've excluded a huge middle ground in your arguments, and I tend to think that the array better makes Hector (who, while not superhuman, was certainly exceptional) rather than Achilles. I also find that many of the stories I read (films, books, etc.) tend to focus on exceptional people rather than on those that are mundane and unexceptional. What you describe as "British heroes" do not really interest me, but that's probably also because I don't tend to like much that is identified as British (like Dr. Who, which I can't stand).

Also, I play 5e. This is the game where a generic bandit captain is 15/16/14/14/11/14, a cult fanatic is 11/14/12/10/13/14, a humble guard is 13/12/12/10/11/10, a unnamed knight is 16/11/14/11/11/15, a bland noble is 11/12/11/12/14/16, and even a street-level thug is 15/11/14/10/10/11. None of these are beyond CR 2, and some are as low as CR 1/8, so these are not overly powerful individuals. I don't think it's a problem for PCs to have the standard array of 15/14/13/12/10/8 (adjust for race and arranged as desired) to be comparable. I think with 3d6 arranged in order, PCs are fairly likely to be less capable than many of these NPCs, and that doesn't work for me.

Quote from: Franky;1069512And then there is the very British hero, James Bond.  Not a particularly ordinary sort, is he?

No. But he has become less ordinary over time, just as America has striven towards what in Civ they called a Cultural Victory - where your culture dominates the world. Plus, Bond was always Ian Fleming's Mary Sue.

Quote from: HappyDaze;1069517Also, I play 5e. This is the game where a generic bandit captain is 15/16/14/14/11/14

Yes, this is indeed a problem. I would suggest: don't play 5e. Turn around and march away from Lake Wobegon.

From The Guardian,

"These structural changes have been accompanied by a life-denying ideology, which enforces and celebrates our social isolation. The war of every man against every man - competition and individualism, in other words - is the religion of our time, justified by a mythology of lone rangers, sole traders, self-starters, self-made men and women, going it alone. For the most social of creatures, who cannot prosper without love, there is no such thing as society, only heroic individualism. What counts is to win. The rest is collateral damage."

The way you approach your game can encourage or discourage this approach. I would suggest again that if the players have got up from their computers and come to your game session, it's because they want to do something together with other people. Approaches which encourage teamwork, wits and daring, rather than heroic individualism, are better in this respect.

Now, if it's a one-on-one game, then that's different.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1069518The way you approach your game can encourage or discourage this approach. I would suggest again that if the players have got up from their computers and come to your game session, it's because they want to do something together with other people. Approaches which encourage teamwork, wits and daring, rather than heroic individualism, are better in this respect.

But is old-school D&D, which seems designed to encourage growing independence and conflict as characters advance (and has a strong tradition, at least in some circles, of ruthlessness and treachery) really a better tool for such aims?

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1069518The way you approach your game can encourage or discourage this approach. I would suggest again that if the players have got up from their computers and come to your game session, it's because they want to do something together with other people. Approaches which encourage teamwork, wits and daring, rather than heroic individualism, are better in this respect.

Now, if it's a one-on-one game, then that's different.

I do not accept that using the standard array for 5e (and no, I have no interest in playing earlier editions again) discourages "teamwork, wits and daring" in any way. The method is different, neither better nor worse objectively, but I prefer it as a matter of taste, and so do (and have) my current (and past) players.

Quote from: Franky;1069512And then there is the very British hero, James Bond.  Not a particularly ordinary sort, is he?

That said, I like the idea of D&D as the Mission:Impossible team, or any other team from TV or Movies.  It is very much a cooperative game.

Actually, the original James Bond from the original novels DOES fit Kyle's British hero type...
He has a few things he is very good at.  The rest of the time he gets through due to some mission specific training, supporting characters, luck and sheer willpower/perseverance.
The movies...now that's a different kettle of fish.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1069465That's likely true, inasmuch as I spend time on Twitter.

Any time on twitter is too much time on twitter...

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;1069522But is old-school D&D, which seems designed to encourage growing independence and conflict as characters advance (and has a strong tradition, at least in some circles, of ruthlessness and treachery) really a better tool for such aims?

Yes.

I mean, whatever the edition some people will backstab each-other and sit around complaining their stats aren't good enough, and some other people will co-operate and play smart. Remember that in order of importance to the success of a game session it's: people, snacks, setting and system. This doesn't mean that the system doesn't matter, only that the other things are more important.